FasCat Cycling Training Tips Podcast

‘Know thyself,’ Plato said. ‘And know thy course,’ Coach Allie says. 

With years of professional racing around the glove under her belt plus years of working with all levels of athletes, Coach Allie Legg knows what it takes to have a successful race. Here are her top 5 tips for having your best race.

Know the course, make (and use!) a pre-race checklist, prepare your nutrition the night before, be smart with your efforts, and take a chance!

Listen to your body, know the variables, don’t treat travel as rest, go with the flow, don’t diet on the bike!

Maddy Ward is a UCLA grad, a former pro with Tibco and InstaFund, and a new FasCat Coach who on this episode delivers her Top 5 Training & Racing Tips.

To start training for your best year yet, get on the FasCat App, which includes unlimited training plans, the Optimize training-to-recovery balance technology, meal plans, access to FasCat Coaches like Maddy Ward and now the new AI-powered technology CoachCat!

 Use the code IMAFASCAT to get a free month of FasCat at FasCatCoaching.com.

Getting better and faster on the bike just got a whole lot better and a whole lot faster.

We are proud to announce CoachCat, an AI technology driven tool inside the FasCat App that delivers interactive workout analysis and guidance immediately upon upload of your workout.

Based on decades of our coaching experience and the cutting edge of both sports science and AI technology, CoachCat analyses your workout file and provides detailed, supportive and actionable text feedback - just like a FasCat Coach. 

Further, you can ask CoachCat questions about the workout you just did, or a workout you have coming up. Things like, 'I only have an hour tomorrow but am feeling good, what should I do?' 

CoachCat provides workout guidance and workout suggestions regardless of whether you are following a plan. Say you want to just ride most days in the week, but then want a suggestion of a workout for one day. CoachCat will offer you a workout based on your parameters and even location, and then once you approve the workout, CoachCat will add it to your calendar so you can view the details and send it to your bike computer.

This podcast is all about CoachCat and the future of training. Give it a listen!

Better yet, go chat with CoachCat yourself! Use the coach IMAFASCAT to get a free month of the FasCat App, which includes unlimited training plans, the Optimize training-to-recovery balance technology, meal plans, access to FasCat Coaches and, now, CoachCat!

One of the new hot topics in training is a concept dubbed ‘durability.’ It’s being talked about by WorldTour coaches and being written about in cycling media. 

But what is durability really? Is it a new concept? Is it a metric? And most importantly, how do you train durability and test for it so that you can improve as a cyclist? 

On this podcast, Coaches Christian Parrett and Andrew Giniat dig into what it is, why it matters, and how you can improve it.

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You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.

Be your best. It’s a simple concept, and hard to achieve. So here, we’re going to keep it simple and straightforward, with five easy-to-remember mantras that will help you be your best in tangible ways. 

Leading you in this is our new FasCat Coach Justin Bowes, an experienced coaching veteran across various disciplines. 

Following a prescribed training plan is the most effective way to improve as a cyclist, and yet… riding and racing in Zwift can be super fun. Can you do both? Yes, yes you can.

Here to help us on our digital and IRL training journey is Coach Jake Rytlewski, our in-house Zwift master and father of five - because you know those two things are related. (Jake also raced professionally for years, so Zwift isn't the only trick in his bag.)

Coach Jake breaks down Three Ways to Maximize your Zwift Training and Racing —  with 9 tips for racing, instructions on how to do OTS rides on Zwift, and how to best incorporate Zwift into your training plan, whether you work with a coach or are self-guided.

Are you racing on Zwift? How many of these nine things are you doing?

9. Line up early 

8. Be ready for a fast start 

7. Stay in the draft 

6. Don’t coast 

5. Know the course 

4. Know the Power Ups 

3. Know the finish 

2. Don’t judge your fitness based on a Zwift result

1. Limit Zwift racing to once a week, twice at the most

Coach Jake raced for years as a pro, in Europe, Asia and in the US, before starting his now-12-year career as a Coach. You can learn more and hire him here: https://fascatcoaching.com/collections/coaches/products/jake-rytlewski

It’s January and many of us are in the thick of new year’s resolutions that may or may not last. Here to help us become better cyclists - with 10 easy-to-form habits that can last and only take 10 minutes or less - is Coach Sierra Sims.

Coach Sierra holds a Master's Degree in exercise physiology, and she did graduate work on the physiology of master’s cyclists and bone health in female road cyclists, mountain bikers, and runners.

This woman is an expert, folks!

Sierra has also won a national MTB championship, and raced at the national level in road and ’cross as well, along with racing in Europe for the USA national team.

Suffice it to say, you're in good hands here, folks. Listen in so you can pick up 10 good habits that will improve your cycling in 10 minutes or less.

You see what you are looking for - Awareness Test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

*Sierra's 4-way charging cable: http://tinyurl.com/yc25z349*

Sweet Spot training is great for a number of things, and today we’re talking about how it’s highly effective for racking up Training Load - a key metric for any cyclist’s training plan.

Training Load is the forest view of your fitness, a weighted 42-day rolling average of your recent workouts. The higher the load, the more potential fitness you have at your disposal.

On a daily perspective, you might be familiar with TSS from your Garmin or Wahoo - TSS stands for Training Stress Score. FasCat founder Frank Overton helped create this metric back in the day! Now at FasCat we use OTS, or Optimized Training Score, which is a more refined metric that accounts for things like coasting during a ride or weighting the power output at the end of four-hour rides higher than the same output in hour one.

On this podcast, Frank and Ben Delaney talk about doing OTS workouts - where the objective is to rack up a prescribed amount of work, not to follow a bar-graph set of intervals.

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Goals are great to have, but a specific plan to reach your goals is where the rubber meets the road - or trail. 

In this podcast Coach Elliott Baring walks you through the three steps to achieve your cycling goals:

1. determine your goals
2. determine the demands of your goals
3. build the training timeline to reach your goals

As a precursor, the nine talented athletes who comprise the Optimize Collective tell us what they are training for, and how they are working with their coach to get there.

Then, Coach Elliott breaks down how you can set your training to achieve your goals, using some examples of two-time Unbound Gravel winner Lauren De Crescenzo, whom he is coaching this year, as well as his own goals, like Belgian Waffle Ride North Carolina and the Leadville Trail 100.

Group Rides and Sweet Spot - two things we love here at FasCat. This podcast puts the two together. 

If you’re new to the pod, welcome! And if you’re new to the concept of Sweet Spot, know that it’s a training zone and a training technique. As a zone, it's between 84% to 97% of your functional threshold power. 

At FasCat, we have Sweet Spot training baked into many of our training plans, especially at this time of the year.

And yes, you can do Sweet Spot workouts on the trainer or by yourself. But cycling is often more fun with others, and the real jedi magic for training is when you can incorporate specific training into either the landscape - like hills or wind - or group rides or even races!

So, how to Sweet Spot in the group ride? The answer, as always is: IT DEPENDS. So we discuss a few scenarios: Hard group rides, medium hard group rides, and then the all-important post-ride analysis.

This is the fourth episode in an eight-pod series on Sweet Spot.

There are so many rad races available for us in 2024, and here, the FasCat Coaches walk you through 40 events that we're excited about.

We’ve got recommendations for road events, gravel events, stages races, mountain bike events, gran fondo events, and more.

While most of the races we suggest are in the United States (as this is our area of expertise), we do have a trio of recommendations in Europe.

When you’ve picked out an event or events you want to train for, we have two great ways to help you get there:

-an Optimize subscription with unlimited training plans

-personal coaching with one of the experts you hear on this podcast

Happy New Year and all the best in 2024!

Riding too hard, too often. Bonking. Not having fun! As cyclists, we have some bad habits, and this podcast is about a few common ailments, and how to avoid them.

Today we have Coach Ricky Arnopol joining us to talk about 6 Bad Habits he often sees in his coached athletes, his pro teammates on the UCI Continental Team Project Echelon, and cyclists in general.

To sweet spot or not to sweet spot - that is NOT the question! Of course you should sweet spot. Everybody does - whether they are doing so consciously or not.

But WHEN to sweet spot, and WHEN NOT to sweet spot,  THAT is the question.

And that is the subject of today’s podcast. If you don’t have time to listen to the entire pod, or you get interrupted, the takeaway here is that most of you should be sweetspotting now, during the winter and early spring, and then when you switch from base to race, that’s when you should stop sweet spotting and focus on your intervals.

Training is more fun and effective when you’re comfortable and stoked on your gear. 

Sure, you could train like Rocky in cotton sweats in the freezing cold of a Philadelphia winter, or stare at the wall of a basement on a trainer like Graeme Obree, but for most of us, having good gear makes a world of difference, whether in clothing or digital measurement and entertainment.

So on this podcast we are talking about gear! We’ve got all the coaches cued up with hot picks, we are talking gear we know and love and recommend, as well as some pieces we do not own but are coveting.

We’re talking about clothing. power meters, heart rate monitors, wearables, outside bikes, inside bikes, smart trainers, tires, software and more.

And, we’re talking about great products from our partners where you get discounts on everything as a subscriber to Optimize - including Castelli, Stages, Ventum, Hammerhead, and Whoop.  

What, when and how much - those are the three big questions of training. 

We dig into that question for our second podcast in an 8-pod series on Sweet Spot: How much Sweet Spot should you do?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer, of course, and how much Sweet Spot you should do depends on:

1. Your ability level

2. The time of year

3. The type and duration of the event you are training for

4. Your training progression from week to week

In this podcast we break down several scenarios so we can leave you with a good understanding of the what, the when, and the how much.

Here is a link to the chart by ability, discipline and time of year that we reference in the pod: https://fascatcoaching.com/blogs/training-tips/how-much-sweet-spot-training

In the spirit of annual training and periodization, now that we have covered weight lifting, the next phase of your training is the base phase.

And longtime loyal listeners know we love the sweet spot - the ultimate way to build your base.  

This is episode # 1 of an 8 part Series of Sweet Spot Podcasts coming up these next few weeks and months.

Today we’ll cover What Sweet Spot is.

In the coming weeks we’ll talk about:

• How Much Sweet Spot Should You Do? 
• When to Sweet Spot and when NOT to Sweet Spot
• Sweet Spotting on Group Rides
• Sweet Spot OTS Rides
• Sweet Spotting on Zwift
• Why Sweet Spot is Better than Zone 2 for 40+, 50+ and 60+ cyclists
• Sweet Spot vs Polarized

At FasCat we’re all about helping you get faster and have more fun, with training methods proven by science and our experience with thousands of athletes.

One thing the scientific community has proven is that taking time to be grateful makes measurable, positive effects on your life. 

Going back 20 years to a study by Dr Robert Emmons, psychologists have consistently found that being grateful can have positive effects on your mental state. 

Further studies since then have shown that taking time to be grateful - to count your blessings, as it were - can benefit your physical wellbeing, too.

So in the spirit of doing some intervals with the aim of improving, on today’s podcast we are doing some grateful intervals, with the entire coaching staff weighing in from around the country and - in Christian's case in France - around the world.

From the Flanders Sportive to the Leadville Trail 100 to Unbound Gravel to just being fit for the group ride, riders have a wide variety of cycling goals for 2024. But how do you get there? How do you time and stack up your various training plans and goals to arrive at your event primed and ready to go? 

That’s exactly what this podcast is all about. We’ll talk about the three main elements of training you need, and how to work your way backwards from your target to right here, right now. 

Those three elements are:

• Off season training - with weights, or not
• Base training - with Sweet Spot
• Interval training / event-specific plans - with long endurance training  
  

On this podcast we walk you through four goal scenarios, to help you understand how to tweak the training process to get where you want to go. And we’re going to tell you about how our Optimize app can automate and simplify this whole process for you - all while tracking your progress and your training-to-recovery balance.

1,200 kilometers, or 745 miles. That's a long distance for an unsupported event! But that's exactly what Lisa Charlesbois did this year at Paris-Brest-Paris, arguably the oldest bicycle race in the world. She finished in 78 hours and 27 minutes, sleeping 9 hours in total during that time.

On this podcast, Lisa chats with her coach Allie Legg and host Ben Delaney about training and preparing for such a monster event — and the excitement and nervousness and motivation for completing such a daunting task in another country. 

Coach and three-time U.S. MTB national champion Elliott Baring has raced all the main cycling disciplines and coaches his athletes in a wide variety of pursuits. On this podcast, he explains his Top 5 Training Tips that apply to athletes of all levels. 

More is not always better, but 'more' is a theme for his top tips.

1. Take on more carbs in races and hard training sessions. The optimal amount varies by person, but you're likely underfueling, which compromises not only that day's effort but the next day's as well.
2. Rely on RPE (rate of perceived exertion) and speed instead of power when racing. And practice pacing with RPE in training, too!
3. Keep things fun. Pay attention to motivation and drive, take breaks, and switch things up. 
4. Be flexible. Going with the flow with decrease mental and physical stress, and make you a more effective athlete and a happier person. 
5. Always be learning. Cycling's various categories are constantly evolving, as is our understanding of nutrition, training and equipment. Also, just because a pro or pro team does or uses something doesn't meant that is ideal for you. Study, test and trial new things.

Announcements!

FasCat has a new Zwift racing training plan, centered around racing on Tuesday for all you WTRL and ZRL racers out there. The plan includes the all-important race warm-up protocol on Tuesday.

SBT GRVL is one of our favorite gravel events on the calendar, but getting in is tough as spots sell out via lottery in a flash. This year, we have a limited number of guaranteed entries that you can purchase with a one-on-one coaching package. Already a coached athlete? Then you can purchase a guaranteed entry here.

Come train with us in April in Santa Ynez! Join the FasCat Coaches for a 5 night, 4 day training camp! Includes lodging, chef-prepared meals, Coach-led rides, airport pickup, sag support and more.